Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age

"I believe in the flapper as an artist in her particular field, the art of being – being young, being lovely."  -- Zelda Fitzgerald

A sparkling new collection of "flapper fiction": stories featuring the iconic women who defined the Jazz Age

Edited and introduced by David M. Earle

Vivacious, charming, irreverent, the flapper is a girl who knows how to have a roaring good time.

In this collection of short stories, she’s a partygoer, a socialite, a student, a shopgirl, and an acrobat. She bobs her hair, shortens her skirt, searches for a husband and scandalises her mother. She’s a glittering object of delight, and a woman embracing a newfound independence.

Bringing together stories from widely adored writers and newly discovered gems, principally sourced from the magazines of the period, this collection is a celebration of the outrageous charm of an iconic figure of the Jazz Age. 

This fabulous collection includes:

• Zelda Fitzgerald “What Became of the Flapper”
• Dana Ames “The Clever Little Fool”
• F. Scott Fitzgerald “Bernice Bobs her Hair”
• Rudolph Fisher “Common Meter”
• John Watts “Something For Nothing”
• Dorothy Parker “The Mantle of Whistler”
• Katherine Brush “Night Club”
• Gertrude Schalk “The Chicago Kid”
• Dawn Powell “Not the Marrying Kind”
• Vina Delmar “Thou Shalt Not Killjoy”
• Guy Gilpatric “The Bride of Ballyhoo”
• Anita Loos “Why Girls Go South”
• Zora Neale Hurston “Monkey Junk”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): American novelist most identified with the jazz age. His short stories and early novels captured both the exuberance of the jazz age and, increasingly, his disillusionment with it. “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is his most well-known flapper story.

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) was a Southern debutante, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and author in her own right. In the 1920s, she gained notoriety as a flapper through Fitzgerald’s writing and their well-publicized lifestyle and as such helped solidify the definition of flapperdom in the public consciousness. 

Anita Loos (1888-1981): Screenwriter, author, and playwright most famous for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), a humorous novel whose main character, Lorelei Lee, is a chorus girl, unabashed gold-digger, and arguably literature’s most famous flapper. First involved in the film industry in 1912, Loos has well over 100 film writing credits. The influence of writing film scenarios can be seen in the present-tense of “Why Girls Go South.”

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967): Critic, author, humorist, and screenwriter most often identified as a member of the infamous Algonquin Round Table – a group of intellectuals and wits associated with the New Yorker magazine who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Though Parker is most often identified as a humorist, due in part to her acerbic criticism and humorous poetry, she was a serious author with deep political convictions.